UKRAINE, Mar 19 — Since the beginning of March, Russian troops have launched 130 missiles of various types, more than 320 Shahed drones, and almost 900 guided aerial bombs in Ukraine, announced President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“We need more protection — a very realistic number of air defense systems that our partners have. “Patriots” and other [defense] systems should do what they were designed to do, and that is to protect lives, not gather dust in storage,” he wrote.

Just over the past 24 hours, on March 18, the Russian military launched artillery and mortar attacks on about 20 settlements in the Kharkiv Oblast.

In total, the Russian army fired mortars and artillery at more than 120 settlements in the Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts.

Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal announced that the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine allocated $128 million to purchase drones for the Defence Forces.

According to the Ministry of Economy, agreements worth about $769 million have already been signed with drone manufacturers, and contracts worth $359 million are being prepared.

Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal also announced that since the beginning of the year, the Ukrainian government has allocated $518 million from the state budget reserve fund for the fortification and construction of defense borders.

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